Losing the Narrative

A shattered bottle tore through my hand last month and split

a vein until every finger was purple and I couldn’t

make even a tentative fist. I used the other hand to indicate

I’m okay.

How unwise I am, how polite in a crisis.

In triage, an overheard photo of someone’s lover

almost 3000 miles west made me seize with longing

when I spied a palm tree in the background.

I understand what it says about me

that my body lustfully wishes to place itself where it was never safe.

I have put enormous energy into trying to convince you I’m fine and

I’m just about there, no?

Besides, decades on, poorly healed bones help me to predict rain!

though it’s true I like to verify weather

with another source because I tend not to believe myself.

I’ve been told repeatedly that I don’t understand plot but

it would be a clever twist, wouldn’t it, if in the end

I realize it’s me who does me in.

You can only hear you look like a hooker so many times
before you become one. Spandex was really big

the year I stopped believing.
I babysat for the rabbi’s son, Isaac. There was luxe carpet

in every room of the condo. Isaac liked Legos
and we made a pasture and a patriarch and lots of wives.

Lynn Melnick

2019

Maybe you’re not the featherweight champ
of all the cutthroat combat sports

(fifteen and pregnant
again)

but you’d convert your ring corner
into a slaughterhouse

before you’d inquire after human kindness.

In the humdrum flare outside the clinic
you wait for a ride, feel the spill at the tipping point

trickle down your inner thigh
as you bask in the post-industrial particulate

on your skin, ash
into a jasmine pot’s bituminous anchorage

Lynn Melnick

2016

Poems